Kamehameha, the great warrior, who
invaded Maui in 1790 and finally, 20 years later, subdued all the Hawaiian
islands, occupies a special place in the history of Hawai'i. Conqueror, king,
statesman and lawgiver, Kamehameha (circa 1758-1819) has been called the
Napoleon of the Pacific.

Although the Polynesians kept no
written records, we know a great deal about their history after they settled the
islands. At least, we know what they thought was worth remembering - mostly
chiefs' names and accounts of their wars and intrigues. For centuries, life on
the islands was not peaceful for long at a stretch, and it was never placid. It
never stood still for long, something was always changing. At the same time,
historical events did not spread from one island or island group to another. We
do not have for early Polynesia any record of wars and conquest over large
spaces as we do for the continents of Asia, Africa, and Europe. We are not told
about any great individuals who actually lived and changed the course of life on
more than one island. Yet even in Polynesia, a change was already taking place
at the time of Cook's death, under the guidance of a remarkable Hawaiian called
Kamehameha.

Kamehameha was born on 1736, and he
died in 1819. the Pacific was still a vast uncharted ocean, as far as Europeans
were concerned, when he was a child. By the time of his death, it was already
becoming a great route across the world for merchants, and a hunting ground for
whalers. Not only European ships and men were coming in, but European ideas.
Above all, there was the European religion of Christianity, spread by the
missionaries. So the life story of Kamehameha shows two things: what might have
happened if Europeans had not arrived at that particular time, and what did
happen, in the end.

Although he was of royal blood,
Kemehameha was kept hidden in the mountains of Hawaii for the first years of his
life. From this fact he took his name, which means "The Lonely One." It was
unusual treatment for a young prince, but it had been foretold at his birth that
he would be a killer of kings. Consequently, his life was in danger for a long
time from those who wished to forestall his carrying out such a career. However,
while he was still quite a young boy, he was brought back to the court of Kalaniopuu, his royal uncle, and given the feather helmet and cloak of a
nobleman. Kamehameha grew up to be a young man remarkable for his size and
strength, and for his courage as a fighter in his uncle's wars.

The king whom Cook tried to kidnap
was Kalaniopuu himself, and probably Kamehameha was on the scene when Cook was
killed. The prince may not have believed that the sailor was a god, but he
certainly appreciated the improved weapons and skills he could see that the
Europeans had. He had not the time to learn as much about them as he would have
liked, and another chance did not come soon. Partly in sorrow and partly in
fear, Western ships kept away from the Hawaiian Islands for years afterward. At
this time Kalaniopuu was growing old, so he appointed Kiwalao, his own son, as
his heir to the kingdom. Kamehameha was given the title of war chief, the next
most important rank. It meant that he was also high priest of the war god
Kukulimoku. In spite of this grand position, he lived quietly on his own lands
and took no part in politics until the old king died in 1782. Kiwalao was a
moderate man, and terrified that his ambitious brother, Keoua, would cause
trouble. So were the other chiefs, who appealed to Kamehameha for support.

By ancient Hawaiian custom, on
the death of a king the land was redistributed among the chiefs. At the
distribution which now took place Keoua was given nothing. Quite possibly
Kamehameha engineered this in order to bring matters to a head. If so, he was
successful. Keoua provoked war, in which Kiwalao supported him against
Kamehameha. Fierce fighting broke out, and almost immediately Kiwalao was
killed. Keoua was declared king. The war went on, always becoming more involved
with the complicated politics of the various islands of Hawaii. Kamehameha
attempted some daring schemes of conquest, but failed as often as he succeeded.
Meantime, events the Hawaiians knew nothing about were to affect their lives.
European merchants decided great profits could be made carrying cargoes of furs
from what is now British Columbia to China, and there collecting cargoes of tea.
By stopping at Hawaii the ships could take on fresh food and water. One of these
voyages, in 1787, a Hawaiian chief was taken along to China, and returned with
many presents. They included muskets, ammunition, and a small cannon. the chief
was persuaded - or blackmailed - into joining Kamehameha and his followers. In
this way, the war chief got control of the new and powerful weapons.

He also showed his foresight by
preventing some of his allies from trying to capture the English or American
visitors. Kamehameha saw very clearly that the attempts would only be
unsuccessful, and might frighten off his source of firearms. All the same, a
couple of years later one of his chiefs, in revenge for an insult, massacred the
crew of an American schooner. Only two men, John Young and Isaac Davis,
survived. Kamehameha at once made those two men his allies by giving them the
rank of chiefs with lands and property. He now had not only weapons but experts
to handle them and train his warriors in their use. That summer Kamehameha
invaded Maui, the island next to Hawaii itself, and conquered it in a single
battle, no one armed only with a spear or club could stand up to his muskets and
cannon. But he soon had to return to his lands in Hawaii, which Keoua had
invaded. Now, it seems, he wanted to end the war with Keoua for good, and
perhaps Keoua was tired of it too. At any rate he accepted an invitation to
visit Kamehameha for a discussion of peace. As he stepped ashore, Keoua was
murdered. His body was roasted and offered in sacrifice to the war god of
Kamehameha, who by this act had at last succeeded in making himself ruler of all
Hawaii.

But this was not enough for him. The
chiefs of the other islands battled among each other, and Kamehameha made war on
all of them. the others wanted only to keep what they had, but Kamehameha wanted
power. By 1810 the corpse of his last opponent had been sacrificed to the war
god, and Kamehameha ruled the whole Hawaiian group of islands. The king had done
something unknown before in Polynesia; he had set up an empire. He even began to
contemplate enlarging it by invasions of other island groups. thanks to the
visits of traders, his name was well known in Europe, where he was sometimes
admiringly called "the Napoleon of the Pacific." But it was not only his
foresight, ambition, and military skill which had won him his great position.
Above all, it was the guns, bullets, cannon, and ships his European friends had
sold him.

In Hawaii itself the sandalwood
trade alone caused devastation, since the nobles forced the people to neglect
their crops in order to cut the precious trees. At last, the king himself
realized what was happening, and did what he could to repair the damage.
Kamehamea set the example of a true Polynesian chief by putting a tapu on
the young trees, and planting fields with his own hands. He himself gave up
drinking rum. But the world went on changing all the time, and the fate of his
country was no longer in Kamehameha's hands. When he died in 1819, he was made a
god like his ancestors, and his bones were hidden away in a sacred cave as
theirs had been, generation after generation. But no one was sacrificed to his
spirit, as had been done for hundreds of years whenever his ancestors died.

Another Story About Kamehameha

When Kamehameha's mother,
Kekuiapoiwa, was pregnant with him, she had a craving for the eyeball of a
chief. Instead she was given the eyeball of a man-eating shark and the priests
prophesied that this desire meant that the child would be a rebel and a killer
of chiefs. Alapainui, the old ruler of the island of Hawai'i, secretly made
plans to have the newborn infant killed.

Kekuiapoiwa's time came on a stormy
night in the Kohala district, when a strange star with a tail of white fire
appeared in the western sky. According to one legend, the baby was passed through
a hole in the side of Kekuiapoiwa's thatched hut to a local chief named Naeole,
who carried the child to safety at Awini on Hawaii's north coast.

By the time the infant in Naeole's
care was five, Alapainui had forgotten his fears and accepted the boy into his
household. It was said that he was a child without laughter, and so he was named
Kamehameha (the Lonely One). At the royal court, he was introduced to the
complexities of the kapu system, the network of taboos that reinforced Hawaiian
society and pervaded every aspect of life. Canoes were not built, nor fields
cultivated, without the proper prayers and ceremonies. It was forbidden under
penalty of death for men and women to eat together, or for the shadow of a
commoner to fall on a chief.

In 1782, Kalaniopuu died, naming his
son Kiwalao heir but giving his nephew Kamehameha custody of the powerful war
god, Kukailimoku. The cousins did not get along well and before long there was
open warfare between Kamehameha and his rivals, and Kiwalao was struck down by a
sling stone and his throat was cut with a weapon edged with shark's teeth.

For nine years, between 1782 and
1791, Kamehameha battled rival chiefs on the island of Hawai'i and embarked on
his conquest of Maui. There were many bloody encounters but no clear victor. As
contact with foreign traders increased, the chiefs hurried to equip themselves
with musket and cannon. In addition, Kamehameha pressed two English seamen into
his service, Isaac Davis and John Young, who would play a large part in his
future victories.

During this time, Kamehameha took
two wives. One was Kaahumanu, a six-foot 300-pound woman who would become Kamehameha's great counselor. The other bride was the delicate 11-year old Keopuolani, with whom he would have a formal politically expedient union. She
belonged to the highest ali'i class, and the right of succession of their two
sons (Kamehameha II and III) was never questioned.

In 1790, frustrated by his stalemate
with the rival chiefs, Kamehameha sought the advice of a famous soothsayer on
the island of Kauai, who said that he must build a new temple for his war gods on Puukohola
(Hill of the Whale) near Kawaihae if he was to be ruler of Hawai'i. Work on the structure
began just before Kamehameha successfully repelled an attack by his cousin Keoua.

On Keoua's retreat south to his home in Kau, he tragically lost a third of his
warriors in a violent eruption of the Kilauea volcano on the slopes of Mauna
Loa. The incident was psychologically damaging to Keoua for it appeared that the
volcano goddess, Pele, had shown her favour to Kamehameha.

In 1791, the Puukohola heiau was
completed. Rows of wooden images and thatched houses for priests and the ruling
chiefs were erected on a huge 224-by-100-foot platform of lava rocks with a commanding view down
the coast. Two of Kamehameha's counselors travelled to Keoua and persuaded him
to come to Kawaihae, saying Kamehameha wanted peace. As Keoua went, one of
Kamehameha's chiefs threw a spear at him, which he then dodged.
Muskets were then fired from the shore, and Keoua was killed. Some accounts of
the story say that Kamehameha genuinely sought to end the fighting with his
cousin but was thwarted by his ambitious chiefs. As was the custom, the body of
Keoua was baked in an underground oven until the flesh
came loose from the bones. The bones, which Hawaiians believed contained the
mana of the chief, were offered to the war god Kukailimoku in a solemn night of
prayer. If anyone made a sound during the prayers, they themselves would have
been put to death.

With the dedication of the Puukohola
heiau and the death of Keoua, Kamehameha who was then in his 30s became
ruler of the island of Hawai'i. Four years later, in 1795, he launched an
invasion fleet of some 1,200 canoes and more than 10,000 warriors and finally
took Maui, Molokai, Lanai, and Oahu. Kamehameha's superior strength in European
weapons was credited with routing the strong Oahu army up the Nuuanu Valley.
Trapped, many of the fleeing warriors were pushed or jumped to their deaths off
the 1,200-foot Nuuanu Pali.

Kamehameha then set his sights on
Kauai and Niihau - 70 miles away and the only islands outside his control. Kamehameha's men encountered a storm half way across the treacherous channel
between Oahu and Kauai and many canoes were capsized. The crippled fleet then
returned to Oahu.

Kamehameha's next tragedy was to
build a navy of very large stable canoes which were rigged with sails of western
design and which could hold 50 to 100 warriors. Some 800 of these peleleu canoes were
eventually assembled on Hawai'i but this fleet met with no more success than the
last. At this time, during a stop-over in Oahu on his way to Kauai in 1804, an
epidemic killed many of his warriors and the magnificent canoes were left to rot
on the shores of Waikiki. Kamehameha himself became ill but recovered. In just 26
years after first contact with Europeans, the Hawaiian population had shrunk
from an estimated 300,000 to 195,000, primarily because of imported diseases,
such as pneumonia, smallpox, measles, syphilis, and gonorrhea.

Finally, Kauai and Niihau were
incorporated into Kamehameha's kingdom in 1810 by diplomatic means. American and
European merchants who did not want warfare to disrupt the lucrative sandalwood
trade finally persuaded Kauai ruler Kaumualii to acknowledge Kamehameha as
sovereign. Kamehameha, in turn, permitted Kaumualii to govern the island until
his death. The conquest of the islands is now complete and it had taken Kamehameha 28 years to achieve.

As ruthless as Kamehameha was in
war, he was generous and forgiving in peace. In addition to the Law of the
Splintered Paddle, he created laws against murder, theft and plundering.
Kamehameha also divided the conquered lands among his high chiefs in detached
parcels to diffuse the possibility of rebellion and to create a lasting kingdom.
In 1812, Kamehameha returned to the island of his birth, Hawai'i, and spent the remainder
of his days in Kailua on the Kona Coast, now a bustling resort town and center
for deep-sea sportfishing. Kamehameha himself was an avid fisherman and
scheduled affairs of state in his later years around the running of his
favourite fish.

Of all Kamehameha's abilities, it
was his resourcefulness in dealing with foreigners that inspired the most
admiration. He obtained from the British and Americans arms to conquer the
islands and western luxuries to enhance his people's lifestyle. No foreigners
were permitted to own land. Indeed, the island of Kauai might well be soviet
territory today had not Kamehameha insisted that Kaumualii expel an ambitious
German doctor, Georg Schaffer, who was in the employ of the Russian-American
Company. The tsar of Russia desired only friendly trade relations with the
Hawaiians, but Dr. Schaffer built a fort for the Russians on Kauai and even
planted the Russian flag on leeward Ohau.

In the spring of 1819, Kamehameha
became very ill, and, when it was clear that he was beyond the help of men
skilled in the medical art, the leading kahuna said a human sacrifice should be
made to save the king. Kamehameha, however would not permit it and early on the morning of 8th May,
1819, Kamehameha drew his last breath. A pig was cooked and offered to the gods
so that his spirit would be received into the realm of the aumakua. Kamehameha's
flesh was removed from his bones and laid to rest in the sea. A sennit basket
was then woven around the bones and taken to Kaloko in north Kona where they
were buried.